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Violinist Kathleen Collins, from the Cleveland Orchestra, works with kindergartners at Village Preparatory School in Cleveland, OH,Tuesday, April 9, 2013. Collins was helping students to enhance their ability to recognize various sounds and to utilize their senses.
(Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

An educator to the core, the Cleveland Orchestra violinist finds genuine delight in appearing at schools, viewing the task as a calling after being reared in music by her mother.

Growing up in Traverse City, Mich., "I had that oversight of a string-player parent," said Collins, a member of the second-violin section since 1995. "It's been a real gift, and it's something that needs to be given back."

Yet Collins hasn't been one of the most active educators in the orchestra for the last 18 years just out of a sense of obligation. No, Collins carries a heavier-than-average load of school visits because she herself derives pleasure from it. Working with young children affords her the one thing her position in the orchestra doesn't: interaction.

Her colleagues are wonderful, she said, and the second violins perform a vital service in just about every piece of music. But as a member of a large section in the middle of the ensemble, she's more or less anonymous.

"I don't really get the one-on-one rapport with the audience," said Collins, a Cleveland Heights mother of three and an avid reader of historical fiction. "I don't necessarily know people.

"When I do education, it's great to feel like I'm really communicating. It's nice to feel that personal give-back."

Indeed, on a recent appearance at a downtown Cleveland charter school, Collins received every manner of personal give-back, in the form of smiles and cheers, from dozens of kindergartners eager for a break from the norm and an encounter with a professional musician.

Collins' long experience working with children was abundantly clear. In each of the three classrooms she visited that day, she applied the same handcrafted lesson -- and every time, it worked like a charm.

After training their young ears to distinguish and identify familiar sounds in the world around them, she helped them apply those newfound skills to music she played on her violin. She even let a few lucky children pluck a string on her century-old instrument in "Pop Goes the Weasel." One group rewarded her with a chant: "That's the way, uh-huh, uh-uh, I like it."

"I've kind of grown [as an educator] with my own kids," said Collins afterward. "I've seen where kids have difficulties and gotten ideas for what can aid those concepts. The creative ideas come pretty readily to me."

Some of those ideas undoubtedly come from Collins' mother, a violin teacher still active in Michigan. As one of six children in a home where music was perceived as mandatory, Collins was literally surrounded by music, so much so that she can't even remember a time when she wasn't playing violin.

The first thing Cleveland Orchestra second violinist Kathleen Collins did on a recent visit to a downtown Cleveland charter school was teach the young students how to listen.Marvin Fong

But Collins didn't truly take music seriously until she began spending time at Interlochen Center for the Arts, near Traverse City. There, playing in student orchestras and other groups, her hobby cemented into a passion, and eventually, around age 14, a career path.

"That was what made music special for me," Collins said of her years at Interlochen. "I realized early on how great it was."

View full sizeStudents in this class at a downtown charter school responded eagerly when Cleveland Orchestra second violinist Kathleen Collins challenged the children to identify sounds in the world around them.Marvin Fong

The Cleveland Orchestra appeared on Collins' radar around this time, though not as a destination. Her main focus over the next several years was gaining entrance to and earning a degree at Indiana University, the closest top-flight music school.

There, after pursuing a degree in music, Collins met and married her husband, Jonathan Fields. Now a real estate manager, he was then a trumpet player who shared his wife's professional aspirations. When the couple left the country after college to join the Hong Kong Philharmonic, he went as the group's assistant principal trumpet.

For three years, the couple lived overseas. And while they never mastered Chinese, they did pick up one useful trait: a love for travel. At the moment, Collins and her family are planning a guided trek in Peru, following similar journeys in Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Guatemala.

"We're all fairly adventurous, in terms of seeing the world," said Collins, in a post-rehearsal interview at Severance Hall.

Cleveland entered in the picture in 1993, when Collins and her husband moved to Northeast Ohio for advanced studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Here, while earning a master's degree in the studio of former principal second violinist Bernhard Goldschmidt, Collins became a fan of the orchestra, and was soon invited to audition.

By 1995, she was in the band, happily playing her current role in the second-violin section, one she said suits her nature perfectly, demanding less in the way of individual showmanship than it does in flexibility.

"It's a different mindset," Collins explained, recalling cherished performances with Georg Solti and Leonard Bernstein as well as concerts with both Christoph von Dohnanyi and Franz Welser-Most at Carnegie Hall and the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria.

"You're in a more subservient role. You have to go with the solo line, wherever that is. It requires a different sort of practice, but also comes with maybe less pressure. I'm really happy just being in the middle of things."

Perhaps surprisingly, given her talent for the job, Collins is not actually a music teacher. Not yet, anyway. That's because, for the last 16 years, she's been engaged in the noble and all-consuming process of raising her own three children and instilling in them a love for music and the arts.

So far, at least, she appears to be succeeding. All three currently play string instruments, with enjoyment, and her oldest is a member of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra.

Thus, between her own children and all the students she's played for, is Collins close to repaying what she perceives as a huge debt to musical society.

"The people and everything I had growing up were completely centered on developing me into the musician I am now," Collins said. "If I can get that passion back out, to as many kids as I can, it's sort of my duty."

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